1922 – a year of challenge and change
A hundred years ago saw the publication of Ulysses by James Joyce, and T S Eliot’s The Waste Land. It was also a year when modernist poets such as Rilke, Paul Valery and Wallace Stevens produced important works. Both among … More details …
Philip Larkin, The Early Years (A Centenary Celebration)
2022 marks the centenary of Philip Larkin’s birth. This dayschool offers a chance to explore and possibly reassess some of his earlier poetry, most notably in the volume that brought him to the attention of a wider audience, The Less … More details …
Reading 1960: Barstow, Reid-Banks & Amis
Join us in discussing three short novels published in 1960. We’ll begin with The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid-Banks, a novel that looks back to the 1950s. For the second session we’ll consider Take a Girl Like You, by Kingsley Amis. For the … More details …
Reading 1936 part 1: Discussing Greengates, by RC Sherriff
Has this novel been undervalued in the past? RC Sherriff’s name is more commonly linked to his 1928 play, Journey’s End, a WWI drama, or with some of the Hollywood film scripts he wrote. He opens this novel on the … More details …
Reading 1936 part 3: Discussing South Riding, by Winifred Holtby
This much-loved novel has been adapted for screen four times. The first was completed in 1938. It’s also been dramatised for radio several times. What is it about this story that keeps writers and directors returning to it? Published posthumously, … More details …
Reading 1936 part 2: Discussing The Weather in the Streets, by Rosamond Lehmann
Virago Modern Classics described this novel as ‘years ahead of its time’. It was an instant best-seller, in Britain and France. Is it still a satisfying read? Lehmann presents us with characters who inhabit a different sphere of society to … More details …
Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset
The sixth and final novel in Trollope’s Barsetshire Chronicles reunites us with a cast of characters we have come to know over the previous novels in the series and introduces us to a few new ones. The novel moves between … More details …
A Century of Irish Poetry
Over the last hundred years, Ireland has produced an astonishingly rich range of poets from Yeats to Seamus Heaney and up to the present day. In this day course we will explore the works of men and women poets and … More details …
Two Novels by Kazuo Ishiguro
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017, Kazuo Ishiguro has written many fine novels. We shall be looking at two of these, The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, exploring their distinctive styles and … More details …
Discussing Burmese Days by George Orwell
Join us on this day course to share your thoughts about Orwell’s depiction of Colonial Burma, in general and by looking closely at the characters, settings and scenes. There will be some background on the author and his legacy, … More details …
The Small House at Allington: Trollope
The fifth novel of the Barchester Chronicles is The Small House at Allington. This novel introduces us to a new range of characters whilst still maintaining contacts with established favourites. The story concentrates around Lily Dale a character about whom … More details …
Ted Hughes: the early years
After a writing career which spanned over 40 years, Hughes’ literary heritage is not only vast, but covers most genres, including not only poetry, but translations of the works of other poets and prose writers, short stories for children and … More details …
Reading 1968: Muriel Spark, Barry Hines and Elizabeth Taylor
Discuss The Public Image, by Muriel Spark, A Kestrel for a Knave, by Barry Hines, and The Wedding Group, by Elizabeth Taylor. We will be looking at each novel in turn, and thinking about the worlds they project, and the … More details …
Free verse or playing tennis without a net?
The great American poet Robert Frost said he would ‘as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down’, and yet much of modern poetry could be described as free verse, so how does it work and does … More details …
Nature’s other Minstrels
Bird song has long been associated with British poetry, especially in the Romantic period, 1780s to 1820s. This may explain why the nightingale became the most celebrated bird in English verse. The course will focus on poems by Coleridge, Wordsworth, … More details …